Two vital learning tools

Too often, you get stuck with errors you don’t understand, wonder what to do next, and ask people for help only to get ignored.

It’s frustrating!

You can try to look for a tutorial every time you get stuck. But you won’t find a pre-made answer to every problem.

Professional developers don’t rely on tutorials like that. They use methods, techniques, and tools like a code reference to find solutions to the errors and problems at hand.

First, in this lesson, we look at the built-in class reference, which you will need all the time when working with Godot. If you use it right, it will unblock you again and again.

Then, there are times when we need to ask peers or the community for help.

I ran and participated in gamedev communities for years, and constantly saw people ask the wrong way and get ignored.

The wrong way is asking only a short question without giving context, being too focused on a technical detail instead of explaining what you are trying to achieve, gameplay-wise.

When you ask for help like that, your chances of getting ignored are high.

Or you may get a poor answer and an irrelevant solution to your problem.

The right way to ask is by giving all the relevant context you can to the readers. There are 6 steps to that:

1. Describe your design goal.
2. Include the exact error message.
3. Share your code.
4. Take a screenshot of your scene’s nodes.
5. Record a video of your running game (optional).
6. Mention Godot’s version if you’re not using the latest stable version (optional).

Finally, if you want people to help you, you also have to contribute positively to the community.

You will get many more answers if you’re the kind of person who takes the time to help in the first place.

Most people in game development communities are, unfortunately, self-centered.

They only ever come to ask for help and promote their work. And as soon they did that, they leave.

If you want people to care about you and to want to help you, you don’t want to be one of them.

To set yourself apart, you can offer to help, or even just start or engage in conversations; be part of the community.